Q: Can I submit to your literary agent?
A: If you feel she’s the right one for you, by all means go ahead. Just understand that I can’t pass your work along to her, but you can submit to her through the ordinary channels. Check out her website here.

Q: I was reading your work on Fictionpress. Why did you take your stories down?
A: I felt that if I was to be pitching my novels to publishing houses asking for them to sign with me and publish my books then they shouldn’t be available for free elsewhere on the internet. You can still read sample chapters and hear more about the series here on my website. Click on Books, then Antebellum on the top menu.

Q: I thought you were a romance writer. What gives?
A: I’m drawn to ideas and characters, not genres. I don’t want to preach at you, I just want to tell a good story. The stories I’ve wanted to tell happen to fall into different genres; it was just chance that Antebellum, my first novel, had strong themes of romance. I find it exciting and challenging to write with different styles for different projects, and I hope to work in varied genres my whole life.

Q: Do all your stories have ‘happily ever after’ endings?
A: That’s a complicated question. Without giving too much away, I would say that I tend to avoid endings where everything works out perfectly and everyone gets what they always wanted. I try to write as true-to-life as possible, and in real life things go wrong. That said, I’m not needlessly cruel, I just let the story take me where it wants to go. Unfortunately, sometimes people get hurt.

Q: What’s it like to be a writer?
A: Very fun, I think. Writers are a varied bunch, but we seem to share a love of words and language. Stephen Leigh once said “You may be able to take a break from writing, but you’ll never be able to take a break from being a writer”, and that’s true. I’m on the lookout for unusual words or phrases constantly, and when I find one that describes a situation perfectly it’s like a sigh of relief: “Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.”

Some writers write every day, or write huge chunks when they get around to it (my friend Jaden Nation, the boy-wonder, can write 30 pages in a day!), but if I can sneak in some writing time I might get in a page or two. Weekends in the morning are the best time for me, and my page-count goes up.

Other than the day-to-day, being a professional writer means I have deadlines (usually self-imposed; Laura, my agent, is pretty cool about letting me set my own pace), have to make edits (sometimes painful if I have to take out a sentence or paragraph I really like for the good of the story), and have to spend a lot of time worrying over whether I’m writing enough, writing creatively enough, writing something people will want to read, writing something that’s going nowhere, etc.

Q: I want to be a writer. What should I do?
A: There’s only one way to be a writer, and that’s to write. It doesn’t matter if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing or if your content is crap or if no one would ever publish it ever. We all have to begin somewhere. Don’t get discouraged because it’s not perfect. Don’t get discouraged because your story ended in the middle of nowhere. Keep writing. Read a lot; this is the only way to take in new ideas and writing techniques and styles. Find someone whose writing style you really like and then figure out why you like it. Incorporate that into your own writing. Figure out what medium you work best in, whether that’s poetry, novels, or short stories. You can write as a reward in itself, or you can write for other people, but write you must.

Q: What’s with the bats and the possums and the butterflies? Isn’t that kind of spooky/creepy/girly?
A: Those three animals are my personal symbols.

The bat represents the duende (pronounced dwen-day), the Spanish muse also known as ‘the tiny darkness’. It is the spirit inspiring powerful and emotionally-charged art such as poetic recitation and flamenco dancing, and was popularized by Federico Lorca in the early 1900’s. To me, bats aren’t scary or creepy, and they never mean ‘Halloween’ in any of my work. Look up a picture of the flying fox bat and tell me that’s not a face you wouldn’t like to cuddle. The bat is my personal muse and I often reference it or the duende if I am speaking of writing within a work. For more on the duende and the bat, read some of my poems about them under Other Work in the top menu.

The possum, or rather the baby possum (called a ‘kit’), appears in one of my first mature poems, The Tiny Darkness. This poem discusses poetry, religion, inspiration, and a nostalgia for ‘home’, and is based on a true event that happened when I lived in Washington: In the summer we would sit on the concrete steps of the front porch and wait for the thunderstorms to come in. Once my mother’s cousin, who was visiting with us, was sitting on the steps when a tiny, baby possum came walking along. It was very young and severely dehydrated in the summer heat, so the cousin gave it water and then it slept in her hand for about an hour before waking up and moving on. In the story of the poem, the thundering storm represents religion and God while the ‘feral baby’ is tied to nature and the wild, and therefore the duende, which is an untameable spirit and itself a creation of God. All of these forces are untouchable in daily life, but on one summer afternoon they collide, and one young girl is allowed the gift of touching the wild, and the ancient unknown. You can read this poem and further explanations of its origin and symbology under Other Work in the top menu.

The butterflies gained a special importance to me during the time I was writing my fifth novel, Go Look There, which is a magical realism collection of short stories tied together by the story of the town’s former mortician and it’s current psychiatrist, and a supernatural tragedy involving butterflies that my have irreparably changed their town forever. You can read more about Go Look There and the symbolic importance of the butterflies, as well as one of the chapters that explains their role in the book’s tragedy, by clicking on Books in the top menu.

Q: I don’t like poetry. Why should I read yours?
A: Perhaps your haven’t read the right type of poetry. Poetry is as diverse as fiction. You could hate SciFi and love Fantasy and still like ‘fiction’. Poetry is the same. Personally, I don’t like ‘classic’ poetry like sonnets, odes, haikus, or work by Shakespeare or 18th century English poets. I would imagine that if you don’t like ‘poetry’ it’s because you’re thinking of ‘classic’ poetry: stiff, indecipherable rhyming with language no one uses anymore. Or, perhaps you object to such drippy stereotypes as the teenage love poems rhyming ‘life’ with ’strife’ and ‘pain that cuts like a knife’. Who could honestly like poetry if those were the only two options?

My poetic style was inspired by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He caught my attention with the following poem:

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Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

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This type of modern, non-rhyming or off-rhyme, minimalistic poetry is my preferred style, both to read and write. For me, poems should capture ideas like butterflies in glass jars – something beautiful and natural to look at and play with. I once read about a poet who called his poems ‘toys’, and that’s exactly what it’s like for me. Poetry, unlike prose, allows an opportunity for the author to convey a single idea or emotion or story as strongly as possible in as few words as possible. Good writers can use poems to make you feel exactly what they want you to feel. Combined with creative reading, poems can convey direct thought, images, and emotions like a psychic transfer. By handing you a piece of paper, I can use symbols and shared connotation (the feel of words instead of their dictionary definition) to show you a performance I put on in my head. I think that’s pretty cool, don’t you?

If you’d like to check out my poems (No strife/life/knife here!) and see if it’s something you’d enjoy, you can find examples in the top menu under Other Work.

Q: Is Savannah your real name?
A: Yup. I was named after the movie ‘Savannah Smiles’.

Q: What does the ‘J’ stand for in Savannah J. Foley?
A: Well if I told you that I’d just be giving away the whole ball game, wouldn’t I?